


Brighter Than All The Stars

by aeruh



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: BUT NOT EMBARASSED ENOUGH NOT TO SHARE IT, Fluff, M/M, Post-Series, SHEITH - Freeform, This is pure fluff, i just wanted to write about the beach, is that the word??, more fluff than those machines at Build-A-Bear, set a few years after the war, that you’re embarrassed about it, they’re on a beach date, uhhhh, you ever write something so self-indulgent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-15
Updated: 2018-09-15
Packaged: 2019-07-12 12:42:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15995456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeruh/pseuds/aeruh
Summary: The war has been over for years. The universe is as peaceful as a universe can be. Keith and Shiro go on a beach date. They have the rest of their lives to go on as many dates as they want.





	Brighter Than All The Stars

Shiro kicked off his sandals before letting himself flop down onto the blanket. Sand got onto the fabric anyway when he landed, and Keith didn’t bother to brush it away. After all, they were at the beach. There was more sand stretched around them than galaxies they’d ever visited. 

“Have a nice walk?” Keith asked once Shiro made himself comfortable, lying on the ground with his left hand under his head. Though the sunglasses made it impossible for him to know what his boyfriend was looking at, Keith would still see the way the area around his eyes wrinkle with a smile. It never faltered to make his chest feel lighter, like he’d just jumped off a cliff. 

“Yeah. I went down towards the pools. I want to take you there before the tides start to come in again.” 

Keith turned his gaze out towards the horizon, and the waves that swelled against the sky. The weather was perfect; cloudy, but not windy. When it came to weather on the coast, either the days were like this, or they were sunny and so windy you had to fight against the draft. Both he and Shiro preferred the former. 

(They also liked these days because the place was less populated then. People feared the possibility of bad weather and kept their families at home.) 

Without looking, Keith let his hand creep across the blanket. When he made contact with Shiro’s own, their fingers interlocked. He left his gloves in the car before they went down to the water, and the metal felt cool in his palm. Shiro tightened his grip, just barely enough for Keith to feel it. 

“We should probably get going then, don’t you think?” Keith proposed. He leaned down a little to brush a kiss against Shiro’s knuckles. His bottom lip caught on the ridges, and the salty air made the contact feel just the slightest bit sticky. They were both going to have to shower when they got to the rental. 

In just the past hour alone, the temperature dropped enough to make Keith wish he brought his jacket. Shiro was in a black Garrison-branded tank top and had to be even colder than he was. Soon they would both be ready to pack the blanket and the cooler and haul it all up to the pickup. If Shiro wanted a cliche, romantic walk along the beach, it would probably have to be now.

Shiro propped himself up on his elbows and removed the sunglasses. He kept them in the usual spot, hanging off the collar of his shirt like some sort of frat boy and not an intergalactic hero. “We saved the universe years ago. Why are you in such a hurry?” 

Instead of answering, Keith got to his feet. He slipped his sandals on, and reached down to tug Shiro up. “Because you’re an old man, and soon you’ll be complaining about the cold,” he teased.

It was surprisingly easy to get Shiro off the blanket. He got up willingly, gave some half-hearted grievance about how he _barely_ had time to catch his breath, and once they were eye level, he leaned forward to steal a kiss. 

“That doesn’t do anything to help you get your breath back again,” Keith commented. 

“Neither does seeing you every day,” Shiro said, so quickly he had to have had the compliment ready. 

He said the same thing so often Keith lost count ages ago, but it never failed to make him feel flustered. There was no way Shiro thought he was breathtakingly attractive, especially not now. Sand was sticking in his hair, and he’d be finding the grains on his scalp for days. It was windswept too, from the breeze, and he forgot sunscreen. Keith’s face was already warm with the beginning of a cloudburn he would have to deal with tonight. 

“Whatever,” Keith managed, quietly under his breath. But Shiro could see through it in a heartbeat and he laughed. 

They left everything behind; the beach was almost entirely empty anyway, and it wasn’t like they really had anything of value on the blanket. The most expensive thing was in the ice chest—the “special reserve” sharp cheddar cheese Shiro wanted to put on his sandwich.

Shiro and Keith walked down the beach with their arms linked together. It was almost painfully cheesy. Keith felt like they stepped out of a romcom. But that didn’t mean he didn’t like it. He soaked in every second they spent together. Fighting an war did that to you, especially one in space. Granted, it wasn’t until after they won that Shiro and Keith got together, but that didn’t stop Keith from worrying if each day they suited up would be their last. Now they had their entire lives, and it looked like they were going to be longer than everyone anticipated. 

Most of the walk passed in quiet. Not total silence; that never happened at the beach, or at least not unless something was seriously wrong. The waves breaking on the shore were white noise and it was something Keith would probably fall asleep to tonight at the beach house. 

Their relationship worked a lot in quiet. Neither had the urge to fill space with words. They didn’t need to. After everything they went through together, all the times they saved each other, it was like they were two halves of the same person. 

(Sometimes it got annoying. Shiro always knew when something was wrong, even when Keith didn’t feel like talking about it. And every once in a while Keith would pester Shiro too often to take care of himself. But those instances were few and far between, and Keith would take a million more of them if he had to.) 

Every once in a while Shiro would point out the boats on the horizon. Though he didn’t have his family anymore, Shiro liked to share his childhood stories. A large portion of them involved fishing trips, or camping along the coast.

“Everything was sandy,” Shiro said as they strolled. “Inside the tent, the sleeping bags—everywhere. I’d give anything to do it again.”

Keith pressed a kiss to Shiro’s exposed shoulder. “Then that’s what we’ll do next time,” he suggested. “Although I still want to get our own beach house. I like renting, but it’s weird sleeping in a bed that belongs to another person.”

“You sleep in my bed all the time.”

“That’s not the same thing,” Keith insisted. 

On their way to the tide pools, Keith halted the progress of their adventure several times. Most of these times were because of the rocks that jutted out of the sand. Water circled around them in wide rings, and they were filled with tiny shrimp and the occasional emerald crab or lawnmower fish. 

“Do you think you could eat the shrimp?” he inquired once.

“You don’t even _like_ shrimp.” Shiro sounded confused.

“I’m just curious.”

“I mean… Technically you could, but I don’t think that’s a good idea. And there’s clam chowder back at the beach house.” 

Eventually they made it to the end of the beach. The tide pools rose up from the sand; hard, gray rock that used to be part of a mountain thousands of years ago and were worn down by earthquakes and the water. Getting to them involved careful climbing and shoes that were much more protective than the cheap, unbranded flip flops they were both wearing. One bad move could end up getting cut by barnacles and mussels. 

Keith was going to try to climb up to them anyway. He liked the anemones, and the urchins reminded him of the soot sprites in that Ghibli movie with the cat bus.

But he couldn’t make it more than a foot before Shiro tugged at the hem of his shirt. 

“Keith, wait.”

There was something in Shiro’s tone that made Keith stop. He paused in his climbing, with one hand stretched out to grab hold of the rock. “What is it?”

In all the years they knew each other, Keith could count the amount of times he saw Shiro looking uneasy in the palm of his hand. This was one of them.

Shiro stood on the beach, one hand in the pocket of his shorts. He wouldn’t glance up to meet Keith’s eyes; instead his gazes was angled downwards. The hand he used to get Keith’s attention was in his hair, combing through his forelock. Keith knew what the signs meant; his boyfriend was nervous.

“Shiro,” he said, “what’s wrong?”

“I’ve been thinking about something lately,” Shiro started. “And I just… I felt like it’s something I need to talk to you about.”

Uh-oh. This sounded serious. Keith jumped off the rock and turned around to face him. 

“...what is it?”

After fumbling around in his pocket, Shiro took his hand out. It was curled around something in a tight fist, and Keith couldn’t see what it was.

“These years that I’ve spent with you have been the best part of my life,” Shiro said. “And to wake up each morning next to you—it’s been the most wonderful privilege I could ever dream of. Because out of all the people on this planet—in this entire _universe,_ you chose me.”

Keith felt something burning behind his eyes as the realization dawned on him. “Shiro—”

But he pressed his hand over Keith’s mouth. “Please,” he interrupted with a slight smile. “I’ve been trying to figure out what to say for weeks, and I didn’t want to read any of it off a notecard while I did this, so my concentration is _really_ focused right now.”

“U-understood,” Keit managed when Shiro let him speak. “Sorry.”

Shiro took a deep breath and it looked like he was trying to regather his thoughts. “I just… I would like to keep spending the rest of my life with you. Which—obviously we would keep doing as boyfriends, but I would really like to call you my husband. If you want to. Because I couldn’t imagine not having you for the rest of my existence. And after too, probably, if you keep on bringing me back.”

Somehow burning feeling managed to leak out of the corner of his eye, and trailed down his cheek. Keith was in too much shock to brush it away, and he let it drip off of his chin and onto his shirt. Blinking was something he couldn’t do, either; instead he stared at Shiro with wide eyes.

Miraculously, speaking wasn’t off the table. Keith breathed in a deep lungful of ocean air and asked, “Are you… proposing?”

“Yeah,” Shiro laughed. “Yeah, I am. I guess I should just ask you, shouldn’t I?”

“Probably,” Keith said with a smile. 

Unlike what happens in the romcoms Keith was thinking of earlier, Shiro never got down on one knee. Instead he reached out across the small space between them, and slipped whatever he was holding into Keith’s palm. 

“This isn’t a ring,” Keith said.

It wasn’t. Instead what sat in his hand was a piece of purple sea glass; it looked almost like a crystal. The edges had been worn down so much they were unbelievably soft. As a matter of fact, the entire surface of the glass was soft, frosted so finely that Keith’s fingertips didn’t know what they were feeling when he looked it over. 

“It isn’t,” Shiro agreed. “I know that you don’t like to wear them. So I was going to go with something else, but when we were here last I was walking and—I found this. And it just felt perfect. It hasn’t had an easy life. It was broken, and thrown away, and it ended up in the ocean and the sand wore it down to this… tiny, little gem. It’s been through hardships and it survived, and that made it into something beautiful. 

“We’ve been through so much, Keith—all of us have. But especially you. But you were always there. You never gave up on me once, and when everything was over, you shone more than all the stars in the universe… also, I thought the color of the glass matched your eyes.”

Keith sniffled like a child. His laugh was watery, and he used the back of his free hand to try to wipe away the tears that were flowing freely now. 

“Keith,” Shiro said slowly, “will you marry me?”

“Of course I will.” Keith threw his arms around his fiancé’s neck and kissed him. When they pulled away, Keith took a deep breath to calm himself down. “That was probably the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard.”

“I got some help from Matt,” Shiro admitted. It was impossible for him to keep a blinding grin off of his face, not even when admitting to turning to the infamous Matthew Holt for advice. 

Keith held the sea glass the entire walk back. He was almost afraid that if it was anywhere other than his grasp, it would be lost. Or that it was all a dream and he would wake to find none of this was real. But the fluttery feeling in Keith’s chest was enough proof that this wasn’t just his imagination.

Once they got home, Keith planned to wrap the sea glass wire and turn it into a necklace. That way it would be with him always, right over his heart; the same place where he kept Shiro, too.

**Author's Note:**

> I didn’t know what was happening at the end of the fic until I was writing it so I only know as much as you guys do. Also I’m going to regret this in the morning.


End file.
